A client of our consulting services asked for my thoughts on this “infographic” from the NHS Employers (a not for profit organisation which is part of the NHS Confederation that has a vision to be “the authoritative voice of workforce leaders, experts in HR, negotiating fairly to get the best deal for patients”) that attempts to outline the changes in the NHS and how these will “empower patients and local clinicians to make decisions about NHS services in your area“.

My first thoughts:

It’s unlikely that the author of understands the concept of an infographic

An infographic is a visual representations of information, data or knowledge intended to present complex information quickly and clearly. I fail to see how anyone can think that this A4 image with it’s 670+ words meets that definition.

The image depicts a bloated focus on paper based monitoring within the NHS

Did you notice the filing cabinets and photocopier that depict the administrative paper based burden that needs to be managed by those monitoring the NHS? Did you notice that all the clinical and learning graphics could fit within a single room in the Monitoring building (while in the distance the monitoring building is nearly the same size as the others and presumably has a Satellite TV subscription).

I’m surprised more people can’t see that if the NHS just brought in clinically validated cost effective ways of using information technologies to automatically document consultations the third building in this graphic would be completely redundant and Patients would have their own record of the care they were being provided with (which would be a great deal for Patients).

What do you think?